by Baker, Scott
"Some of the damned are there eternally, no longer have any existence except as part of Satan, but the vampires are only there during the day. They could renounce the Compact and free themselves at night, when they're themselves again, but at night they don't have the knowledge to free themselves, they've forgotten what they knew during the day."
"But you remembered."
"Only because I have not one, but two souls. The human soul endured Hell, was swallowed up by Satan, while the Naga soul looked on, and when Satan released the human soul and made it forget, the Naga soul remembered."
"And Christ?"
"What Uncle Stephen said: Satan's finest creation. The bait for His hook."
"Father," I said after she'd finished speaking, "did you hear what she said?"
"I heard it, but I don't believe it. It makes no sense."
"But you told me the same thing, or almost the same thing, before you died. In a letter. And you haven't signed the Compact yet."
"He can't believe it, David, not even if he knew most of it when he was alive. That's what happens in the forty days—the other vampires make him over, take away everything in him that would keep him from being exactly like them when the time comes for him to enter the Compact. He's one of them now, part of them already, even if he isn't wholly a vampire yet. And none of them will ever believe the truth.
"It's part of Satan's game, the way He tortures them, and Himself: they actually have the ability to renounce the Compact and escape Him at night, but they have none of the memories that would let them realize that they want to renounce it, and they can't believe the truth about themselves when someone else tells it to them."
"But if we could do what father said in his letter," I said. "Find some way of giving them their daytime knowledge at night, when they'd be free to renounce the Compact. If there was some way of sealing them all in their coffins for the seven years, and making sure that none of them escaped, and that Michael and Uncle Stephen did nothing to free them—"
"No. Unless you found a way of reawakening their memories of Hell it would be useless. Remember who they were when they were alive, who they'd be again. The Countess Elizabeth Bathory. Vlad the Impaler. David Mathewson, the one who had all those women hanged as witches in Scotland. All the rest of them. Even if we could bring a few of them to believe us and accept a death from which there'd be no returning, the rest of them would be only too glad to become vampires once again when they died."
"So we do what? Try to escape and hope I live long enough to put you in your coffin, keep you there for seven years, and finally let you out again, after you die? And that you can do the same thing for me if what Aunt Judith did to me's enough to make me a vampire when I die?"
"I don't know, David. Try to get free and stay alive long enough to find a solution if there is one."
Or to find our way to Patala. If there was a way. And if I could free myself of Monteleur first.
Monteleur, who was waiting for me back in my body. Waiting for me to recover consciousness so it could hurt me the way it had hurt me when I'd returned to my body in Carlsbad. And the longer I waited, the worse Monteleur would make the pain.
"Send us back," I told father.
* * *
Chapter Thirty-three
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John was sitting bare-chested in the sun on the front porch, his eyes closed. He'd lost a lot of weight. A great purple butterfly with blue eyespots on its wings and tails like a black swallowtail's, only much longer, was resting on his right shoulder, slowly opening and closing its wings.
He opened his eyes, stared up at us without moving. "Hello, David. Welcome home." There was no warmth in his voice or face.
"Hello, John. What are you doing here?"
"Waiting for you. Stephen said you'd be here sometime today or tomorrow. This is Dara, I take it?"
"Yes. Dara, this is John. An old friend. He's a painter—John, you said Uncle Stephen told you I was coming? Is he here now?"
"Yes. He's back in the cave, but he'll be out fairly soon. You're supposed to wait for him here."
"Is my brother with him? Michael?"
"No. He won't be arriving for another month or so."
"For the Lammas Day Sabbat?"
"Yes."
"John, how well do you know my uncle?"
"Meaning what, David? Are you trying to find out just how much he's told me? Whether I'm a friend and associate of his or just an innocent dupe?"
"All of that, I guess."
"A friend and associate, then. Alexandra introduced me to him about four years ago but I didn't join his coven until after the rest of you tried to kill her."
I thought about that a moment, said, "John, neither of us had anything to do with that. That was father and Michael, not us. But what do you mean, tried to kill her? She's not dead?"
"No. Stephen rescued her for me."
He twisted his head cautiously to the right, stared a moment at the butterfly fanning its wings on his shoulder. It was bigger than any North American butterfly I'd ever seen—it must have had an eight-inch wingspread—and though it was abroad in daylight it had the feathery antennae of a night-flying moth.
"That's her, David. Alexandra. She's a butterfly now. And she's mine, like she always wanted to be. You can't have her back."
The butterfly shifted position on his shoulder. Alexandra. But I'd touched her cooling skin, watched the coroner's deputy probe her wound with his thick red fingers, close her eyes.
Alexandra. And the dead rise up never, unless they're vampires and then they're still dead, and then they'll always be dead. And she couldn't be a vampire, not there on his shoulder in the hot sun.
"That's really her? You're sure?"
"Of course I'm sure."
"How did it happen?"
"She'll tell you about it herself, if you'd like her to. But we'll have to go inside, where you can hear her. Her voice is too tiny now for you to hear her over the wind and all."
We went inside, sat down at the table. I noticed that the bookcase against the far wall that had held my aunt's collection of grimoires was gone. John sat down across from us.
"Don't try to get too close to her, or even breathe on her too hard," he said. "She's very delicate now."
"We wouldn't want to do anything to hurt her," Dara said.
"Just don't. And speak softly. You're talking too loud already. Loud noises scare her."
"Alexandra?" I asked, leaning close and whispering.
"Yes, David?" The voice was so faint I could barely hear it. I couldn't tell if it was Alexandra's voice or not.
"Tell me about it. What happened, how Uncle Stephen saved you."
"After you and John left to go swimming your father took control of me and made me open the bushmaster's cage," the thin voice—Alexandra's voice?—said. "And then he kept me from doing anything to save myself when Michael and Dara—"
"Just Michael," I said. "Not Dara."
"—while they used the snake to try to kill me, and then to keep you from getting to me with the antivenin."
"You were still—alive?" I asked. "You knew I was there in the cave with you, trying to save you?"
"Yes. They weren't expecting you back so soon, not while I was still alive. But I'd been part of Stephen's coven for a long time—I always knew that Michael was just planning on using me and then getting rid of me, that he never meant to give me any of what he'd promised me—and so even though you weren't able to get past the bushmaster and use the antivenin to save me, Stephen was there, waiting to snare my escaping soul. He gave me this butterfly to use until Lammas Day, when the constellations will be right for him to give me a new human body."
"Whose body?" Dara demanded.
"Perhaps yours, perhaps someone else's. He hasn't told me yet," the butterfly said with a tiny tinkling laugh.
But it wasn't Alexandra's laugh, could never have been her laugh, no matter how physically altered she was. Unless she'd become a vampire, and it was still brig
ht out, still early afternoon: the butterfly couldn't be a vampire. I knew Alexandra, knew her for all her lies, for all the ways she'd tried to use me: whatever she'd done would have been done to satisfy her hungers, her greed, never out of the cold passionless delight that rang through the butterfly's laughter.
And if Uncle Stephen, if any Bathory could snare escaping souls and give them new bodies the family could have had the immortality it sought in the flesh, without having to become vampires. Another lie.
The butterfly shifted on its six legs again, uncurled its thread-thin black proboscis and jabbed it into the base of John's neck. John held himself very still, careful not to dislodge the thing.
He looked proud, a bit shy. I could see that his neck and shoulders were covered with tiny red-brown welts, almost invisible against the tan. Not a vampire, but some other form of parasite.
And Alexandra was dead, finally and irrevocably dead, or Uncle Stephen would never have had to resort to the butterfly to keep John tied to him.
"I keep her alive," he said. He was keeping his voice low, looking away from the thing while he spoke. Protecting it. "She'd prefer to live outside where she could fly around drinking nectar from flowers like a real butterfly, but it's too dangerous. There are too many things out there that would like to eat her. Birds, spiders, lizards, frogs and toads. Even other insects, real ones. Blood's better, like a sacrament we can share between us."
He was looking at me as if to say, a sacrament that only the two of us will ever share, that unites us in a way you'll never know. Another victim. Like Uncle Peter, Aunt Judith. Like Alexandra herself.
The butterfly withdrew its proboscis, delicately recurled it. A new body on Lammas Day. Some other kind of familiar or demon, being prepared so that on Lammas Day it could take possession of Dara as Bathomar had been unable to do?
The door opened and Uncle Stephen came through it, followed closely by three men in dark-blue suits who looked like Jehovah's Witnesses.
"Don't bother to get up," Uncle Stephen said, playing perfect host. He smiled and as he smiled Monteleur jabbed knitting needles through my knees again. "How was your trip, David?"
"Why don't you just ask Monteleur?" I demanded, unable to put up with any more of his unending cat-and-mouse. "Since you're going to anyway?"
"Because I have no need to ask Monteleur anything. Ever. I keep in constant communication with him through my own familiar."
"That?" I jerked my head in the butterfly's direction. John scowled, hunched his shoulder protectively.
"Not at all. That's Alexandra there on John's shoulder, whether or not you want to admit it, David. But I carry my own familiar around inside me the same way you do yours. That way it can keep me young and healthy and free of disease, protect me from heart attacks and kidney failures, that sort of thing."
I ignored the implied threat, said, "Then you don't need me to tell you what happened."
"True. I don't. I know all about your attempt with the cobra, and I intend to punish you for it. Both of you.
"Your own punishment, David, is unfortunately going to have to be more symbolic than real, more of a demonstration of our respective positions than an attempt to actually hurt you for what you did. I have few illusions about my ability to outdo Monteleur in the infliction of physical pain.
"But in Dara's case, as I think you can see, things are a bit different. If for no other reason than that any pain I cause her will serve to provide you with a further demonstration of your own helplessness. So—
"Here." He picked up one of the cotton sacks I used to transfer my snakes, handed it to her. "Go back up to David's truck and get the cobra you used. Put it in the sack and bring it back here to me. David, you stay here with me while she goes after it."
Dara left, returned a few minutes later with the bagged snake.
"Stand over there. Good. Now, take it out of the bag and hold it where we can all see it. Then kill it. Twist its neck until it's dead. Do it now, Dara, or I'll see that Monteleur hurts David while I kill the snake myself in some way that'll be much more painful to it."
She held the cobra a moment longer in her cupped hands, staring into its eyes. The cobra stared back at her, absolutely motionless, making no attempt to escape.
She killed it.
"Very good. For the rest—Come along with me now, the two of you. I've got some things to show you. John, you stay here until we get back."
One of Uncle Stephen's assistants preceded him through the door, waited for him outside. The other two followed us.
There was a small stand of live oaks just outside the entrance to the herpetarium. The bushmaster was nailed to the trunk of the biggest of them, hanging from a single thick nail through its head. Dozens of other dead snakes—garter snakes, king snakes, rattlesnakes, all the commoner local varieties—were heaped in a rotting pile around the base of the tree.
Uncle Stephen had had the entrance to the cave enlarged: there was a new door blocking it, thick brass-studded wood, perhaps seven feet tall. It took three keys to unlock it.
While the Jehovah's Witness who'd accompanied him across the meadow was unlocking the door, Uncle Stephen turned back to us, nodded to indicate the hanging bushmaster and the pile of dead snakes and said, "All that training you gave John in the care and collection of snakes turned out to be of some real use after all. As you can see."
I didn't say anything, tried to keep my face expressionless. Uncle Stephen smiled again, as though that had been just exactly the reaction he'd been hoping for, and gestured us inside. The Jehovah's Witness with the keys locked the door behind us.
I'd left the herpetarium unchanged when I'd put the cabin up for sale, more as a demonstration of the kinds of things one could do with the cave than because I'd actually thought someone would have a use for the cages and tanks. They were gone now, replaced by racks of swords and lancets, quills and wands; cloth-covered altars; jars full of teeth and bones; other, larger, jars in which homonuclei floated in varicolored fluids; pentacles drawn on floors and walls and hanging sheets of parchment—all the apparatus and equipment of a magician's laboratory.
In the back of the cave, where the narrow fissure through which the bushmaster had tried to escape had been, a broad keyhole-shaped archway had been cut through the. purplish-red stone. On either side of the opening a hand of glory was mounted on a slim stone pillar. Through the arch I could see a huge cavern, high-ceilinged and very deep, with a granite floor covered with small circular depressions in which wood fires smoldered. Men in dark shirts and tunics were feeding the fires, kneeling before altars, chanting prayers; others were constructing something massive in the center of the open space. The rock glowed faintly silver.
A man in black was sitting at a high table just our side of the archway, copying an old manuscript onto fresh parchment. Nicolae. He didn't bother to look up as we passed him.
We threaded our way between the fire pits, came to another brass-studded door set into the silver-glowing rock. Uncle Stephen's torture chamber. Even before the assistant with the keys had drawn back the bolt and unlocked the door I could smell the stench of the room beyond: blood and rust and urine, wood smoke and charred meat.
The room was twice the size of the cabin, full of antiques that Uncle Stephen told us had been in the family since our ecclesiastical ancestors had first used them in the service of the Inquisition. Thumbscrews, Spanish boots, the ladder. Instruments for ripping and cutting, burning, breaking and crushing.
The Jehovah's Witness with the keys locked the door behind us.
I was blindfolded and gagged, manacled to a post and whipped. My lesson in humility. Uncle Stephen wielded the whip himself—a nine-lashed scourge, like the cat-o'-nine-tails with which British sailors had once been flogged, only supple braided black leather instead of rope, knotted, with tiny iron barbs twisted into the knots. Another heirloom.
And each time the whip struck Monteleur hurt me somewhere else, hurt me worse than Uncle Stephen could have ever hurt m
e with the scourge alone, kept me jerking and twisting and trying to cry out in no doubt exquisite counterpoint to Uncle Stephen's blows.
When it was over he had one of his assistants remove my blindfold, then stand holding my head to keep me from looking away or closing my eyes while the other two assistants stretched Dara on a horizontal ladder—the rack, as it was sometimes called—and fastened her legs to one end, her bound arms to a kind of tourniquet attached to the other.
Uncle Stephen began tightening the tourniquet, methodically increasing the force that would soon yank her bones from their sockets, leave her crippled and disjointed, if he didn't stop. Dara gave a sudden, involuntary cry, then clamped her jaws shut, denying him the pleasure of hearing her cry out again.
I was still manacled to the post, still gagged; I could do nothing but watch, nothing but listen to the screams that I alone could hear.
Uncle Stephen continued to tighten the tourniquet. I began to hear the dry popping sounds that Dara's bones made as one by one they were pulled from their sockets.
When it was over we were returned to the cabin. Dara had remained silent, had only allowed her control to slip as she was taken from the rack, and then only to the extent of a single short moan as she lost consciousness. I was led, she was carried, back out through the caverns to the cabin.
They put her on the bed, left us alone. She was quiet now, not even moaning any more, her breathing ragged and shallow. I didn't know if what Uncle Stephen had done to her would have been enough to cripple a normal person, and if it had been, whether her dhampire's ability to draw on outside forces or her Naga ancestry would give her the strength she'd need to heal herself.
I lay down beside her on the bed, afraid to touch her, afraid that anything I could do to try to help her would only hurt her more. I tried to stay awake, to watch over her and be ready to protect her or help her if she needed my help, but too many days of fighting my own fear and pain had drained me, and I no longer had even the strength I would have needed to keep myself conscious.